This program is sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and the Political Science Department at Case Western Reserve University

Perhaps no person in the 20th century affected more people or had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. Drawing from his latest book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, award-winning social scientist Ezra Vogel argues that the economic reforms instituted by the Chinese leader resulted in more people rising out of poverty than in any other period. Presiding over unprecedented economic expansion and engagement with the West, but also the authoritarian crackdown in Tiananmen Square, Deng was single-minded in his drive to modernize his county. Called “a masterful new history of China’s reform era” by the Washington Post, Vogel’s 2011 accounting of the parallel rise of Deng and the world’s second-biggest economy provides the basis of the lecture.